Let Kirstie Allsopp into your home for this seasonal adventure in cosiness and nostalgia. Plus, you don’t even need to make a thing
Much – much! – like Kenneth Tynan and Look Back in Anger, I could not love anyone who did not love Kirstie Allsopp’s programmes. The property ones, the arts and crafts ones, and especially the Christmas ones. This year, she has a series of 10 hour-long programmes airing on Channel 4 under the Kirstie’s Handmade Christmas banner, stripped across two weeks and perfectly designed to keep away what threaten to be quite some seasonal blues.
Before that series begins, however, we have Kirstie’s Christmas: Quick and Easy Craft (also on Channel 4). It is full of little projects that Allsopp promises – as only she, with the palpable sincerity and constitutional inability to lie that is her USP, can do – will take no more than 45 minutes each to do. “Your time is precious,” she says, sternly. “We want maximum impact for minimum effort.” I feel suddenly hugely bolstered by my ongoing efforts to wrestle into submission the violent chaos that is my life even in lockdown.
Allsopp flakes wax crayons with a pencil sharpener and shoogles them around inside a transparent bauble that has been heated by a hairdryer, until she has a coloured bauble. She melts the first lot into a brown lump (“because I’m impatient”), but she soon gets the hang of this “joyful craft”.